


Endings

by quigonejinn



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Life is, unfortunately, not an ending.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endings

You are sitting in a car in Florida. The night is dark and thick with humidity; every half hour or so, you have to turn the wiper blades on to push the mosquitoes and various other bugs off the windshield. Right now, it’s the passenger’s turn to watch the stakeout target’s house: Barton is a boy compared to you. How old was he was he brought you into SHIELD? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? A dozen years later, he looks forty. You still look twenty-six or twenty-seven. 

He turns to you. ”You think they’ll move him tonight?”

You shrug, and you notice that his eyes stay on your face for a moment longer than they need to: it isn’t just that a dozen years later, he looks forty, and you still look twenty-six or twenty-seven. It isn’t even that you are beautiful. Instead, Clint Barton thinks that he knows your file and past. He thinks that he is in love with you, and if you had the heart, you would explain to him why you sleep with him and laugh with him and tell him jokes and listen to his jokes and put your hand on the back of his neck and listen to his heart beat under your ear, but won’t give him anything else:

_Once upon a time,_ you would say to him.

_Once upon a time there was a girl. She may have had red hair; she may have had a red cloak with a hood. The wolf may have eaten her. She may have eaten the wolf._

_It was a long time ago._

…

You are standing in line in a grocery store in Brooklyn. You have a carton of orange juice in your left hand and a grocery basket with some eggs and bread in your right. There is a grocery cart in front of you and a little boy sitting in the seat. Three years old? Maybe four. He has an older sister. The boy looks at you for a moment, and then his eyes get very wide. His older sister is maybe nine or ten, and she looks up from the library book that she is reading. She squints at you, a little skeptically, then her eyes and mouth go very, very wide together. 

Their mother is up ahead, tired, still wearing her waitress uniform, sore from standing all shift. She moves her weight from foot to foot, and she knows the cashier. They talk, and you learn, without meaning to, that the elevator in the building is broken again. There wasn’t a thing in the apartment left to eat, so what was she going to do? Let them go hungry? Leave them home alone while she went out? There is a moment of silent commiseration, then you step in, apologize for overhearing, and offer to help. 

She is more than a little suspicious at first — some lonely white guy in a grocery store at eight-thirty on a Tuesday night? You can see it on her face, but her little boy keeps insisting that you are Captain America, and her daughter is shy and trying to hide behind her. Also, the facts are on your side: the groceries are heavy; the elevator in the building is busted. It’s a warm June night, and the stairways, being stairways, will be a good ten degrees hotter than it is outside.

It turns out they’re closer to twenty degrees hotter: a sweatbox. the fan at the top of the stairway isn’t working either, and so much of this is familiar. The flickering lights, the dirty linoleum, the smell of human piss and rodent droppings underneath cheap disinfectant. The stale air, the smell of other people’s cooking, other people’s radios and televisions. You have a drowsy three year old boy on your right shoulder, a school-age daughter’s backpack full of schoolwork your left. There is a bag of groceries in each of your arms, and you think about trying to tell the mother about some of the places you grew up in, so that she’ll know you’ve seen worse, you’ve lived in worse, but you can see how tired she is. Her daughter wobbles on the fourth floor landing, and the boy on your right shoulder shifts in his sleep.

Your mouth doesn’t know the words, Steve Rogers, but your heart does. _Once upon a time, there was a soldier in a war, fighting in a castle. There was evil. There was sleep. A spinning wheel? Maybe not, but he expected to die. He expected an ending._

_Life is, unfortunately, not an ending._

…

_Once upon a time,_ nobody says to no one. 

_Once upon a time, there was a boy who expected that life would bring him good things. Why wouldn’t it? He was young, he was strong, he was handsome. Then, he went to war. The wolf ate him. Winter caught him. Is there anything left?_

Natasha divides their remaining ammunition in half, and Steve and Natasha consider each other for a moment behind the barricade. There is a smear of blood on Natasha’s forehead, and her left arm hangs awkwardly; the jacket that Steve is wearing is singed on the left shoulder, and he can feel something both hot and cold at the same time running down the inside of his right sleeve. Blood, probably. Where is his shield? 

Bullets whistle in through the bits of the wall above them, and after a breath, Steve and Natasha start returning fire.

_James Buchanan Barnes is dead. Death is, unfortunately, not an ending._

**Author's Note:**

> Destronomics has the best editing suggestions.


End file.
